Scattered across a 1798 memorial in Lullymore West, County Kildare, is a collection of early medieval stonework that was never made for the spot where it now stands. Seven cross-inscribed stones and two freestanding crosses were lifted from an early ecclesiastical site at Lullymore East and relocated to serve as fabric for a commemoration of the 1798 rebellion, giving the memorial an accidental double life as a repository of much older devotional objects. A further cross-inscribed stone was taken to the nearby Bog of Allen Nature Centre Museum, meaning the original assembly is now divided between two destinations.

Among the pieces incorporated into the memorial is a small, roughly worked cross, just 36 centimetres high and 32 centimetres wide, catalogued by researcher M. Kelly as Cross 8 in a 2006 study. Its presumed original home was the early monastic site at Lullymore East, a place with roots stretching back into the early medieval period of Irish Christianity. Cross-inscribed stones of this type, sometimes simple incised markings on flat slabs and sometimes shaped into freestanding crosses, were common features of early Irish monastic enclosures, marking boundaries, graves, or points of prayer. This particular cross is small enough to hold, and its rough execution suggests it was made without pretension, probably by someone working within the community rather than a specialist craftsman brought in for a prestigious commission. Its journey from a monastic field to a political monument is the kind of displacement that happened quietly and often across Ireland, where later commemorative projects drew on whatever sanctified material was close to hand.